Page 12 - The Secrets of the DNA

The information necessary to specify the design of all the species of organisms which
have ever existed on the planet, a number of approximately one thousand million, could
be held in a teaspoon and there would still be room left for all the information in every book
ever written.

could be stored in a computer the size of a room, can today be stored in small
"microchips", yet even the latest technology invented by human intelligence
after centuries of accumulated knowledge and years of hard work is far from
reaching the information storage capacity of a single cell nucleus. We think that
the following comparison would be sufficient to give a sense of the smallness of
DNA, which has such an immense capacity:
The information necessary to specify the design of all the species of organ-
isms which have ever existed on the planet, a number according to G.G.
Simpson of approximately one thousand million, could be held in a tea-
spoon and there would still be room left for all the information in every book
ever written. 1
How can a chain invisible to the eye, made up of atoms arranged sideways,
with a diameter the size of a billionth of a millimeter, possess such an informa-
tion capacity and memory? And also add the following to this question: While
each one of the 100 trillion cells in your body knows one million pages of infor-
mation by heart, how many encyclopedia pages can you, as an intelligent and
conscious human being, memorize in your entire life?

THE SECRETS OF DNA
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